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Thursday, December 10, 2015

14. Twitter Likes (Favorites)

Now that you have set up your Notifications, you can learn about LIKING TWEETS. Until recently, Twitter likes were known as Twitter favorites, and they were indicates with stars rather than hearts. So, if you look at older tips and tutorials, you will see references to favorites and stars.

Different strokes for different folks. One of the things that is confusing about Twitter likes (favorites) is that different people use them for different purposes.

Some people use them as a way to connect with a person: since the tweet author gets notifications when you like their tweets, it's a way to reach out to and connect.

Other people use "likes" as something similar to a bookmark, keeping track of tweets for future reference.

When you are looking at a profile, your own or someone else's, you can see their "likes" as a link you can click, filtering the stream for liked-tweets only:

To like a tweet, click on the heart that you see along the bottom of any tweet. The numbers shows how many people have liked the tweet:

Better ways to bookmark. As I mentioned above, some people do try to use the likes (favorites) as a kind of bookmarking system inside Twitter, but it's not very efficient. If you want to save tweets for future reference, it's much better to bookmark them with a serious bookmarking tool like Diigo. You can even use a tool like IFTTT to automate harvesting of tweets in Diigo; more about IFTTT later.

Tweet URLs. Each tweet has a URL all its own which can bookmark just like any other URL; the time/date stamp is a clickable link. So, for example, this tweet from Chaucer Doth Tweet has its own URL. Click this link to see the tweet on its own page. Here's the tweet:

And here's what it looks like on its own page; notice that on its own page you see the replies displayed together with the tweet!

So, you can decide just how you want to use the Twitter "like" system, and you can also decide if you want to get into the habit of bookmarking tweets for future reference. (Later on, I'll explain about another alternative — Inoreader — which will collect and save all your tweets for you automatically.)

NEXT STEP => After you've taken a few minutes to play around with Twitter likes, you can move on to the next activity: Twitter search!

About those hearts... A lot of people were appalled by the advent of the hearts; it happened in November 2015. There was some great humor that results from the mocking of the hearts... my favorite tweet was this one:

It looks like the hearts are here to stay, but there are extensions you can get to change the hearts to stars in your browser (that's what I do; I use Starback).